At this point, there have been so many lawsuits filed against Johnson & Johnson over its talc and baby powder products, and judgments against the company based on cancer caused by those products, it’s becoming hard to keep track of them all. Luckily, Bloomberg did the work for us: J&J is facing “5,500 claims in U.S. courts, [and] has lost four previous jury verdicts in St. Louis for a total of $300 million.”
And you can add another verdict to that list, this one coming in California. A Los Angeles jury awarded Eva Echeverria $417 million after finding J&J liable for not warning about the cancer risk in its baby powder products.
Problem All Over the Country
“J&J needs to see they not only have verdicts against them in St. Louis, they now also have them in Los Angeles,” Echeverria’s attorney Mark Robinson said. “There’s a problem all over the country with women using talcum powder on daily basis for 10, 20, 30, 40 years.” The 62-year-old woman began using the talcum powder products when she was 11 and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2007. Of the total award, the jury charged Johnson & Johnson with $347 million in punitive damages.
While J&J has and continues to defend the safety of its Baby Powder and Shower to Shower talc-based products, various lawsuits have cited studies linking talc to ovarian cancer and accused the company of failing to adequately warn customers of the risk.
Denying the Obvious
Most damning of the allegations against J&J revolve around what the company knew and when. According to one lawsuit, the Cancer Prevention Coalition notified Johnson & Johnson’s CEO in 1994 that studies showed using talcum powder in the genital area posed “a serious risk of ovarian cancer.” And the AP has reported on an internal memo in 1997 from a Johnson & Johnson medical consultant said “anybody who denies” the risk of using hygienic talc and ovarian cancer is “denying the obvious in the face of all evidence to the contrary.”
The latest judgment against J&J may be the latest and one of the largest, but it’s far from the first and likely far from the last as well.